Kate, you have been way more kind to quincie on this than I feel. I get why she might not like your long posts, fuck, I even get why she might feel like they're space-sucking. But to add that gendered element to it - yes, I think that's transphobic as fuck and awful. Incredibly fucking awful.― emil.y
i think that's a really good perspective as well and i'm glad you were able to say that! (i know that's therapy-speak, i just don't know how to express my feelings _without_ lapsing into therapy-speak haha).
that's kind of what makes it difficult to talk about this stuff in a public forum, what makes twitter such a hellsite (or made twitter such a hellsite, i guess, now apparently it's elon musk who's making twitter a hellsite. i appreciate the concept. like why do people always want to remake _good_ movies? why remake _all the king's men_, that's already a perfectly fucking good movie. why not make _escape from the bronx_? that's the way to do it. except that for all its hellishness twitter did occasionally have, ahem, _redeeming social value_. by which i mean communism.)
sorry. haven't had coffee yet. the point is, you say something and one person will be ok with it, more than ok with it, and somebody else will think it's incredibly fucking awful, and even if the question is directed at _me_ personally other people's experiences in a public forum are important! that's what i struggle with sometimes when i make myself vulnerable and choose to say things that reflect on me poorly, but are true.
well anyway i can only speak for myself and i do think i'm gonna double-down. getting that feedback _was_ emotionally difficult and made my day more challenging in the short-term, but in the long term it gave me the opportunity to say some things i'd wanted to say for a long time. like it's a paradox but transphobia actually _has_ helped me a lot. and i'm gonna start out by phrasing this in the extreme form, so i want to say up front that this _isn't_ how i feel about quincie.
all of the worst, shittiest things transphobes say about me were things that i internalized, that i believed about myself. hearing _them_ say it helped me examine those beliefs more critically. because i looked at the people saying these things and i was like, "wow, all the people who believe these things about me are incredibly terrible people. i'm not an incredibly terrible person. the people i look up to and admire don't think these things about me, in fact, they think the opposite. maybe i should listen to the people i like and not the people who are awful."
that's not the point of similarity here, the relatable thing is that i had a _whole lot_ of internalized transphobia. it was a tremendous weight i was carrying. i hated myself a lot for being trans. when other people started hating me for being trans... i know personally the weight of that hatred. i'm really happy that other people are, of their own volition, willing to carry that weight, particularly given that it's their fucking weight to begin with, not mine.
the stuff quincie said, that's stuff i've thought about myself for a long time. that's a really strong concern i've had, that i'm "acting like a man" by talking and explaining incessantly. quincie expressing that, externalizing my internal transphobia, taking on the _weight_ of it, is something i'm really grateful for. unlike with the radical transphobes, i don't think that makes her a bad person. i don't get the sense that she's "just asking questions", either. this is a space that _is_ affirming and welcoming to trans people. by asking the question she asked within that context, it really made me feel safe to address it in detail. to, uh, respond to accusations that i'm "space-sucking" by "space-sucking" some more.
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so ok, i'm gonna get really controversial here. there's this sort of implicit assumption that trans women's goal should be to be as much like cis women as possible. and cis women are amazing, i love, respect, and admire cis women. and lust after cis women too, because, yeah, i'm very lesbian. the thing is, a lot of the shit cis women are raised with is fucking misogynist patriarchal bullshit, decades upon decades of that, and i don't view not having been directly beaten down and taught to think of myself as categorically inferior to men for decades as being a deficiency i need to remediate.
i don't think the solution here is that i need to be quieter - i think cis women need to be louder, angrier, god since last june i've _felt_ the fucking rage so many women have, and we're not supposed to feel that, only _men_ are supposed to be enraged. my favorite aunt gave me a book a couple years ago called "Burn It Down: Women Writing About Anger". this is fucking bullshit and the fucking fragile-ass _men_ are trying to say that _they're_ the ones who get to be enraged, _they're_ the ones who are being done wrong, and FUCK. THAT. one of the things that really connected with me hard last year, i talk a lot about it, is a 1994 essay by susan stryker called "My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage".
it's more complicated for me than that, as it turns out. see, the thing about my behavior being categorized as "male behavior" is that i didn't get this from men. i got it from my mom. she's a cis woman but she's also Not Like Other Women. she's one of those libfems who believes in "equality" and took that to mean "i can do anything a man can do" and put that into practice and suffered a lot for that, for being outspoken the way a man is. and also suffered because, well, she's an awful, abusive person. she's also where i got my rage. she taught me that, by abusing me. my rage _isn't_ clean. it's _justified_, we _all_ have a right to it. i have to be very, very careful with it. it's addictive to me, addictive like alcohol is to my youngest sibling. but it's something we all fucking _need_ and _deserve_ right now.
and that's another thing i admire about quincie! as much as she's calling me out for space-sucking, she's being loud, she's being outspoken, she's not conforming to how women are _supposed_ to behave, we're all supposed to get together and watch "the sisterhood of the traveling pants" and honestly i'm more of a thelma and louise kind of girl. refusing to call each other out in the name of "solidarity", that's the kind of game i played for a long time and it's not good. if we got differences, if we got distrust, i think it is both _possible_ and _important_ to name them, to name them honestly and with kindness.
and to me, that's what quincie did. to me, that's preferable to me swiping right on cis women on Her and just wondering why none of them ever seem to swipe back. i mean cis women all live with that, that fear of being _A TERF_, and that's what I really wanted to say, that for quincie to say what she said _doesn't_ make her a TERF, that these are misconceptions, prejudices even, that a lot of cis women have and are under a lot of pressure to pretend they don't have. I get that, I was raised with a lot of prejudices, and I _know_ I have prejudices, and I struggle to not be ashamed of them. Because I'm not a bad person, I was just raised with some stupid bullshit, and I don't know how to get rid of or challenge that bullshit without naming it and taking accountability for it. Which, again, is what I feel like quincie is doing here.
And by the way that's one of the reasons for my space-sucking. I do a lot of explaining things, and it _looks_ a lot like mansplaining (just like BPD _looks_ a lot like narcissism sometimes). I'm not interested in that. You can't change somebody else's mind by lecturing them. I explain things because that's how I _learn_. It's, like, _the_ most single effective method of learning. I do see it as a positive good, I want there to be more of it. Womansplaining. Not explaining as _discourse_, explaining as a form of _learning_, of challenging ourselves.
Anyway I know all that is just gonna piss more people off, with them I'm in a hole and I won't stop digging, but there is _something else_, something else I'm really wanting to get at. And I don't know how to do that without digging myself further into a hole when it comes to how they think of me.
― Kate (rushomancy), Tuesday, 18 July 2023 15:04 (nine months ago) link
I explain things because that's how I _learn_. It's, like, _the_ most single effective method of learning.
I totally get this. As in, it's something I do, and it's something a number of my friends do as well. And, being on the receiving end, does make me more self-aware of how I am, and how I can be annoying, maybe?
One of my friends that does this a lot to me, I will sometimes get frustrated because he is very loquacious. And I will ask him, "Does it matter that I am here listening to you?" As in, I am present for this conversation, but it is mostly his monologue and I'm supposedly the audience, but, am I really? Or ... as the audience, do I get some agency here? Can I like, fast forward through some of it?
― sarahell, Tuesday, 18 July 2023 16:21 (nine months ago) link
three weeks pass...
six months pass...